The WebSocket Transfer Agent
wsta is a cli tool written in rust for interfacing with WebSockets. wsta has
the simple philosophy of getting out of your way and letting you work your UNIX
magic on the WebSocket traffic directly. The way it does this is to be as
pipe-friendly as possible, letting you chain it into complex pipelines or bash
scripts as you see fit.
Since wsta is really pipe-friendly, you can easily work with your output in
a way that suits you. If you have a websocket-service that returns JSON, you
might want to have your data printed in a nice, readable format.
jq is perfect for that.
$ wsta ws://echo.websocket.org '{"test": "what?"}' | jq .
Connected to ws://echo.websocket.org
{
"test": "what?"
}If you're debugging some nasty problem with your stream, you are probably only
interested in frames related to your problem. Good news, grep is here to save
the day!
$ while true; do echo $(( RANDOM %= 200 )); sleep 0.2; done | wsta ws://echo.websocket.org | grep '147'
147
147
147
147
147
147Use wsta to monitor your websocket uptime. Use the --ping option to keep
the connection alive, and check the exit code for issues. You could also
potentially send the last few messages with POST data.
#!/bin/bash
while true; do
# Start persistent connection, pinging evey 10 seconds to stay alive
wsta --ping 10 ws://echo.websocket.org
if [ $? -gt 0 ]; then
curl -X POST https://SOUNDTHEALARM.yourcompany.com
fi
sleep 30
doneCurrently the only requirement to run wsta is openssl. If you get an error
about a missing ssllib.so or similar, search your package manager for openssl
or similar to add this library.
You run Fedora? You're in luck! I've set up a download page here that you can
get wsta from
https://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=home%3Aesphen&package=wsta
I'm working on getting more distributions into the Open Build Service pipeline, which is what creates the releases on that page. For now, you need Fedora to use that page. If you don't use Fedora, have a look below at other options.
I only have 64-bit Linux machines available to create binaries with, but if you
have a 64-bit Linux machine, I do provide the binary in every release here on
GitHub. Have a look at the most recent release, and place the attached binary
into your $PATH.
https://github.com/esphen/wsta/releases
DON'T PANIC. It's really easy to compile and install wsta yourself! Rust
provides solid tools like cargo for automating the compilation. If you compile
wsta yourself, it should run on all of
rust's supported platforms.
I have only tested Linux, however, so YMMV.
# Install the rust language and tools
curl -sSf https://static.rust-lang.org/rustup.sh | sh -s -- --channel=beta
# Install required libraries, using your distribution's package manager
dnf install -y gcc openssl-devel
# Clone the git repository
mkdir -p ~/workspace
cd ~/workspace
git clone https://github.com/esphen/wsta.git
cd wsta
# Finally: compile and install it to your system
sudo cargo install --root /usr/local
# This will create a file called .crates.toml. You can delete it if you want
sudo rm /usr/local/.crates.toml
Install the rust language and tools. We use some cargo environment variables that are beta features (cargo 0.10).
curl -sSf https://static.rust-lang.org/rustup.sh | sh -s -- --channel=beta
Run the program
cargo run -- -vvv -I -e ws://echo.websocket.org
In order to generate the man page, groff is needed
make man